Facebook profile - “People you may know”
Today I was checking my Facebook profile and saw almost all current and past co-workers suggested in “People you may know”. How the hell do you know that all of them are/were related to me? For example, there was a co-worker from 7 years ago that I haven’t talked at all, but somehow FB knows that I may know this person. Anyone from FB willing to clarify? The algorithm works amazingly well, but it scares me that FB knows all of this somehow.
Bc they look you up and stalk you and then fb remembers
Some more info here about how it works. https://gizmodo.com/how-facebook-outs-sex-workers-1818861596
I didn’t quite get any info on how it actually works. Just that it’s creepy and you can’t stop it. Am I missing something?
I'm not an engineer so I'm not responding as a "fb employee," but from what I have seen it is usually - friends of mutual friends, people you've emailed if you ever imported your email contacts, people who share the same education or work history, people you're in multiple groups with or people who go to the same events.
Facebook uses over 100 inputs to decide who to show in "people you may know", according to a Facebook spokesperson. Some of these inputs are bound to be creepy. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-figured-out-my-family-secrets-and-it-wont-tel-1797696163
It is a ML problem, you put in data and you have a connectivity model,
Someone should add business rules to not show exes and partners exes as friends request too - sometimes it gets a guy in trouble !!
I got freaked out when I saw someone in the people you may know list, a colleague who chatted with me on the same day with a technical issue, who is totally unrelated to my team or location
It’s the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenom. And since there is a clear identifiable connection to those you’re seeing, it’s a lot smaller degree. I’ll flow chart it in a future post 🤓
Lol
Six degrees turned out to be false claim. The author never conducted full experiment and his claim was not even academic journal. It was just one persons's guess without proper experiement.